The Refugee Crisis, the Paris attacks and the Death of History. Part 3

Some further points might bring this [The argument advanced in Part 2] home. The first is that, even if straightforward,
binary hostility between Romans and barbarians, or between Christians and
Muslims, does fundamentally account
for a particular event in the narrative ‘chain’, that does not mean it explains
any of the others. Equally, if one event can convincingly be explained
according to a ‘longue durée’ account of the conflict for the control of long-distance
trade within the ecological and economic context and constraints of
interconnected Mediterranean communities – with ethnic or religious labels only
used as rallying cries – that does not mean it necessarily works for any other
event in the ‘chain’. In other words, any event can only be understood on its
own.

The second – and quite obvious – point, developing one I made earlier, is that no
event in history has ever been caused
by a preceding event. The First World War did not in and of itself cause
the Second World War. The assault on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 did not – in itself – cause, or bring about,
the ‘War on Terror’. At no point was
anyone compelled by the First World War or ‘9/11’ to do anything in
particular. What they did, they chose to do. I do not claim that anyone had a completely
free choice or that there were no constraints on their actions or their political
vocabulary but there was never a single way to respond to the attack on the
Twin Towers, there was never a single way in which the trauma of the Great War
had to be employed in German, or French or British politics in the 1920s or
1930s, and there was never a single way in which people had to respond to such
uses of past events. There has always
been a choice. The role of the historian
is to account for and understand why certain responses, or certain vocabularies
(or discourses), rather than others were chosen and ‘worked’ with their
political audiences.

The third point that I want to make – and again it is a fairly obvious
point and one that I have made many times before – is that the results of
historical actions and events can be the diametric opposite of those intended
by any of the agents involved. It is this accidental or ironic aspect of
history (and indeed of being) that in
my view continues to be under-explored, whether in history or in philosophy. An
event intended as a straightforward crusade/jihad by one set of monotheists
against another might in the end result in some sort of cohabitation and
understanding; an event or action intended to bring faiths together might do
the opposite (e.g. the Council of Florence alluded to earlier); an event or
action not intended to have any religious significance at all might become the casus belli for a vicious inter-faith
conflict.

If we choose to analyse any action or event in history, it is –
obviously – us who define that event and its parameters. Once defined, any event is – obviously (yet
again) unique and unrepeatable. It has,
furthermore, no inherent
relationship, qua event, with any
other event, earlier or later. It may be linked by contemporaries to other
events in various forms of political and social discourse, or by later
historians constructing narratives as discussed above, but any such links are
only ever made in the moment, in the ever moving present, and with effects (as with
the events themselves) that can never be assured.

Admittedly, this sounds like uncomfortable advice, not least because it
undermines almost every justification for the study of history that is ever
trotted out. What I just referred to as
embracing the radical discontinuity of history and the irreducible singularity
of past events cuts the ground from beneath any attempt to claim that history
has any relevance at all, at least as usually defined.[1]
Indeed, when I last discussed these ideas, one commenter claimed that I was
arguing for the removal of the ‘whole point’ of history. Historical narratives, which are supposed to
be so important to the teaching of history,[2]
and to the maintenance of cultures and nations, do not explain anything. Indeed they only inform you of the most banal
descriptive sequence. Imagine
blindfolding yourself, being spun round three times and then trying to walk
through your house, while a friend filmed you bumbling about, walking into
doors and furniture and trying different directions. Playing the film back and watching it would
serve exactly the same purpose as learning any historical narrative. Historical agents have no idea where they are
going. They might think they know but it
rarely turns out that way. You can’t see
the decision-making process from the film, and that process itself was based
upon half-remembered, misunderstood, often misleading past experiences. And
that is with a single, unilinear sequence, unlike the infinite different
strands that can be followed in history.
History does not tell us who we are and how we got here except in the
most banal fashion possible. This happened. Then this happened, and then this
happened. But none of the happenings chosen was caused by the previous event
selected or caused the one that came next. So there is actually no explanation at all; just a selective and
misleading description.

The ideas I have proposed are also antithetical to any of the claims
made that history has any bearing on what might be termed ‘policy’. I have
argued before that no knowledge of history was of any value in the debates on
whether or not to attack Iraq. The
argument that Blair and Bush would not have invaded Iraq had they but known
more about history is one that has only been made effective with
hindsight. As I have said before[3],
the argument that the British experience in Mesopotamia should have deterred
the invasion is extremely weak and relies upon the notion that the inhabitants
of the region were somehow bound to behave in 2003 in exactly the same way as
they had in 1920. Such an argument could easily enough be disposed of in the
run-up to the invasion and, had the war somehow been a success, would hardly be being presented as a justification of
history now, after the event. No. The only forceful intelligence available to
help judge the feasibility or otherwise of attacking Iraq at the time was that
which related to Iraq and its internal politics in 2003 – and we all know
how much of that was either ignored or falsified – and the necessity of having
some sort of reasonable plan for what to do afterwards. History had nothing to do with it. When Tony Blair
told the US Congress, before the Iraq War that ‘[t]here has never been a time
when … a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day’ it
was the first half of the statement
that was wrong, not the second. A study of history (by which, in this case, I
mean the simple study of past events seemingly similar to those happening in
the present) has never been capable of providing
much, if any, instruction.

The deconstruction of narrative fatally undermines the arguments for the
importance of the long term in providing history that is somehow useful to the
formulation of policy that have been made recently (by two more history
professors from Harvard – it’s a faculty that seems currently not to be
excelling itself in the intellectual stakes). Long-term narratives, as noted,
are artificial constructs. The proposal that they can show which ‘threats’[4]
are major and which are merely passing trends will simply not withstand
scrutiny. In addition to the selective
construction of narrative (as above), the argument is obviously teleological
and – ironically – therefore entirely contingent, dependent upon the short term.
Yet, the book in which these extremely weak arguments were put forward managed
to become the subject of a special issue of the once-great journal Annales. Thus far have we fallen.

Paul Krugman, Nobel-laureate economist and sharp observer of and
commentator upon current affairs, has recently read both Tom Holland’s and
actual historian Robert Hoyland’s accounts of the ‘Rise of Islam’ (the phrase
emplots the narrative in itself, of course).
He concluded that, while they were interesting, he doubted that either
tell us very much about the current situation. He is absolutely correct. The only thing that helps us to understand
what is going on now is the analysis of what people are doing now and why they
say they are doing it. This, clearly,
follows on from the point I made earlier about past events having no force in
and of themselves.

Clearly, the argument I am making here is probably profoundly shocking
to people who actually do think that a study of a particular past can somehow
usefully inform government. And yet the arguments to the contrary are uniformly
weak. Why has the discipline History let
itself get into the position where it can make no robust argument for its
intellectual value other than cock-eyed notions of relevance on the one hand or
an élitist argument that historians need not justify what they do at all,[5]
on the other?